Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Accepted Paper:

Facilitator, facilitated? Craft relationships, innovation and technological variation in the wood crafting and metallurgy of the Northern European Bronze Age  
Rob Lee (University of Southampton)

Paper short abstract:

This paper asks how interactivity between materials and craft practitioners can be characterised. It offers thoughts on the possible evidence and interpretations which can be used to analyse the relationships between the crafting of wood and metal during Northern European Bronze Age.

Paper long abstract:

The evidence available for wood crafting during the Northern European Bronze Age is extensive. There exists great scope for the examination of this in relation to developments in technological technique and object form within a wide range of contexts. Alongside this, examination of technical variation in metallurgy offers the opportunity to characterise evolving object forms such as tools and their possibilities in wood crafting. This examination can be used not only to assess technological change but also as an analytical tool in characterising the potential for co-operation between differing craft practices. Coupled to evaluation of how notions of craft can be understood, such analysis can lead to identification of the integral place of this co-operation in the innovation and implementation of new crafting techniques and forms.

The paper argues that this scope for viewing change derived from interactions between craftspeople is especially significant in the case of wood crafting and metalworking. It examines their relationship in terms of the potential to view one practice through the other. The quantity of bronze tools alone offers a vast dataset from which a broad range of craft activity can be inferred, and the paper considers how a re-analysis of this data, coupled to assessments of how environmental contexts could affect wood working techniques and usage, can reveal unexplored themes in understanding and characterising the relationship between these materials during the Northern European Bronze Age.

Panel S27
Making the Bronze Age: craft and craftspeople 2500-800BC
  Session 1